Procter & Gamble fired his father in March 1908, and the family returned to Saint Paul. As a boy, Fitzgerald was described by his peers as unusually intelligent with a keen interest in literature. His parents sent him to two Catholic schools on Buffalo's West Side-first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908). Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903. One year after Fitzgerald's birth, his father's wicker-furniture manufacturing business failed, and the family moved to Buffalo, New York where his father joined Procter & Gamble as a salesman. Edward's first cousin twice removed, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry, and had moved to Minnesota from Maryland after the American Civil War to open a wicker-furniture manufacturing business. His mother was Mary "Molly" McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer. īorn on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote in 1814 the lyrics for the American national anthem " The Star-Spangled Banner". His family never owned a house they only rented.
After his birth, his parents moved to a two-story home (right) in Buffalo, New York. Life Childhood and early years įitzgerald (left), unbreeched as a child in St.
1.9 Sojourn in Hollywood and Lois Moran.1.4 Struggles and literary breakthrough.His friend Edmund Wilson completed and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the " Great American Novel". His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the " Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.īorn into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age-a term he popularized. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (Septem– December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.